TEA Project’s Epoch 11 — Moving to Ethereum

Epoch 11 represents a major step forward for the TEA Project. The biggest change that users will notice is that we’ve moved from Substrate to Ethereum for our layer-1. This was accomplished by deploying a solidity smart contract to Ethereum. As a consequence of this move to Ethereum, users will notice a few significant changes:

• End-users will no longer use the Polkadot.{js} wallet extension to interact with the TEA browser wallet. They’ll instead use Metamask which is the most popular wallet in the Ethereum ecosystem. This move will significantly reduce the amount of friction for new users to join the TEA Project. Not only is Metamask a more mature interface, its number of average monthly users (in excess of 30 million) dwarfs that of Polkadot.{js} (approximately 50K active monthly users). This speaks to the much larger network effect of Ethereum and Metamask which will help the TEA Project as we move towards relying on popular Web3 tools.
• Current users will no longer use Substrate-based addresses (SS58) and instead migrate to using Ethereum based-addresses (ERC20). We’ve reached out to contestants from earlier epochs to provide use their ERC20 addresses so that they can have a smooth transition to Epoch 11. In addition, our TEA token will be released as an ERC20 token, and our CML NFT will be released as an ERC721 token.
• A liquidity pool for our testnet TEA and testnet USDT (COFFEE) will be setup on Uniswap. This liquidity pool along with the TEA Project’s solidity smart contract will be released on Ethereum’s Goerli testnet for Epoch 11.

The TEA Wallet, TAppStore, and TApps

The UI flow for end-users on TEA’s Epoch 11 testnet will look like this:

• Load the TEA browser wallet (https://wallet.teaproject.org).
• Select a CML node to launch the TAppStore.
• Select a TApp to launch from within the TAppStore.

The TEA wallet will list all CML hosting the TAppStore from which users can choose. Once they launch the TAppStore, users can see a list of all TApps running on the system.

Besides the TAppStore, there will be other TApps that are considered core system TApps providing essential ecosystem functions to end-users:

• Harberger auction — a TApp where end-users can purchase state maintainer seat licenses and update their self-valuations.
• Leaderboard — used during the testing epochs for contestants to join the contest.
• Miner portal — those wishing to run a TEA hosting node can use this TApp to administer their mining machine.

An additional social messaging TApp known as the TEA Party will be brought back online sometime during Epoch 11. This is a sample 3rd-party TApp that’s been released by the team as a template for how to do TApp development.

Besides launching other TApps, the TAppStore has two other main sections:

• Investments — this section lists all bonding curve tokens for all the various entities on the TEA platform. Investable tokens will include TApp tokens as well as those issued for each CML miner.
• Account — this section will list the end-user’s liquid TEA tokens as well as those locked up as deposits (generally hosting node deposits). Users can utilize the topup and withdraw functions in this section to move their assets between layer-1 (ETH) and TEA’s layer-2.

Hosting Node Improvements

Much of Epoch 11 has been focused on improving the functionality of the two types of hosting nodes in the TEA system: CML hosting nodes for hosting TApps, and the state maintainer nodes for hosting the state machine.

• Features in development for CML hosting nodes in Epoch 11 include the ability for hosting nodes to store a local cache of the state. There will also be an option to allow hosting nodes to become “seated” and pay a state subscription fee for quicker state machine updates.
• For state maintainer nodes, there will be a strong focus on tweaking the incentive structure to ensure that running a state maintainer node is profitable while also providing opportunities for those adjacent to the state maintainer nodes in the TEA ecosystem (CML nodes who pay the state subscription fee and earn remote attestation rewards, TApp developers who pay the state memory tax). Expect many of these fees and rewards to be tweaked during Epoch 11.

Technical Improvements in Epoch 11

A new innovation with TApps is that we’ll have set spending limits for each. This is a precaution so that any one TApp cannot do anything malicious like drain funds. This is an end-user setting that’s controlled in the TApps section of the TAppStore for their account.